Henry Britton

“ The high-born chief is a perfect study. Whether you see him stretched on his cool, scarlet-fringed mat in dreamy and tropical laziness, smoking his cigarette, or out working in his garden planting taro and trimming banana trees, like one of his serfs; or strolling through the village or along the beach; or sailing in his favourite clipper canoe, often with the outrigger dangerously balanced just above the water, and scudding along like a flying-fish on nothing, to show you how cleverly he can sail without capsizing her ”

“ The sun rose like a molten globe shorn of his beams and powerless to outstare a man, but giving a pale effulgence like that of the moon. As the spectral light crept up towards the zenith it disclosed a sight which has often appalled stout hearts, though forming in itself a magnificent spectacle—a storm-tossed 19sea breaking in mad fury upon the South Sea reef—one of those mighty fabrics of coral which myriads of tiny architects, the conquerors of the ocean surge, have raised as natural breakwaters for all the islands of the Fijian archipelago. ”

“ When passing over these marine spirit abodes, the sailor must remove his turban, neck ornaments, and armlets, take his comb and “head-scratcher” out of his big head of hair, wash the paint from his face, give the groan or grunt of respect as to a high chief, and in every other way, however high his own rank may happen to be, make himself in all things of no account.
Nearing the capital of Naulivou’s kingdom, an exquisite panorama unfolded itself to our view. We were in the magic circle of a fairy ring of islands. The curious illusion of the mirage fell upon the scene. ”

“ I gasp for breath as the closing waters ring in my ears, crashing, and roaring, and booming with the voice of a thousand cannon. Now we are falling with incredible velocity. Falling! Falling! Oh God! Will the end never come?
My next recollection was that of being awakened by a hot sun playing on my face. To my amazement I found that I was lying with my head on a crown of cocoanut leaves, and that the deck of the schooner, which was quite uninjured, was half-buried in the thick green foliage of a tropical island. ”

“ When this god-possessed giant sailor sprang from the crowd and clasped the mast with his hands, at the same time pressing the soles of his feet firmly against it, and curving his back outwards from it, in the true Fijian climbing attitude, quite a scene took place. The climber’s mother rushed forward to stop him from his foolhardy attempt, which she looked upon as the act of a madman. When her maternal fury was at its sublimest height she discharged at him volley after volley of the hardest epithets to be found in cannibal vocabularies. ”

“ Tortuous and dark as all this of necessity is, it helps us to increase our knowledge of the cannibal and his religion; while the fractions of scientific truth, though conveyed in broken echoes from dark and unexplorable caverns, tell us of changes which the forces of nature have made in this southern world—changes so stupendous that the unphilosophising brain of the cannibal could not allow them to be forgotten, but must needs report them in the history of every god, interlace them with the inventions of every legend, and embalm them in the wild effusions of every poet. ”

“ The difficulties and dangers of ocean passed, the undaunted hero joyfully prepares to land. As he poles his canoe towards the beach, over what in that part of Fiji is a shore-reef, and draws nearer and nearer to the home of the illustrious goddess, he descries in the hills that form the immediate background of the picture before him, a silvery waterfall, the dancing glories of which greatly gladden his heart, especially as the thought impresses itself strongly in his mind that such a fall can be no other than the bathing-place of the “World’s Attraction.” ”

“ Wading out to the reef, which separates the lagoon waters from the dark purple of the outer ocean, we enter on the wonderfully beautiful submarine rainbow produced by the sun gleaming on the sunken coral. The colors of the solar prism are marvellously blended. The parrot fishes which glide about—the tiny fishes of pale blue and bright green, with bands of black, white, and gold, and sky-blue collars, which dart in and out of the subaqueous growths—give an indescribable charm to the picture. It was Lolóma’s delight to watch her own supple reflection gleaming in these tranquil depths. ”

“ Late in the afternoon we rested in a clump of sago palms on the verge of a pretty waterfall descending like a rainbow flash in a wildly romantic mountain gorge, above which towered a conical rock of great height. The approach was through tangled masses of diverse greenery which almost shut out the sunlight from this fairy dell. The water fell some 20ft. in a triple cascade down into a transparent pool formed in a rocky bed, and the three little jets there uniting made two more similar leaps to add their small volume to a pebbly brook which flowed on to the coast. ”

“ Imagine such an island extending far beyond the limits of the present group of remnants, say, some 600 miles from east to west, and 500 miles from north to south, and we have before us a picture of what was, not unlikely, ancient Fiji—a land of high mountains and far-stretching plains, of rivers, lakes, and springs of water, of shores thrown out here and there into bold and rocky prominence, or stretching away in long lines of shingle and sand. ”

“ The sound was that of air travelling with the highest attainable velocity, and carrying with it the ocean spray. It was as if we were actually enclosed by a great body of water rapidly in motion, forming part of a concrete moving mass, and as though every particle of the element was endowed with the power of shrieking demoniacally. No man’s voice could by any possibility be heard, nor could anyone stand on deck without holding on to something. ”

“ When I took my lonely bird’s-eye views of what was visible of this small island-world, it often occurred to me that I was looking upon fragments which were but remnants of a vast continent in past times—rafts with men upon them anchored out at sea, to tell us where the giant forces of Nature tore asunder great countries, now broken into a thousand pieces. ”

“ So he waited; for neither man, nor hero-god could have been so unpolite as to decline such hospitality. Tanóva presently rose, and taking down the water-bottle, made as if he were going to pour its contents into the soup, when, behold! while he was in the very act of doing this, out fell the monster canoe and her hardy crew! As might be supposed, the astonishment of all the assembled gods was great beyond the power of tongue to tell. Dumbness was the only proper expression of it. ”

“ New gods sprang up with every slight addition to a tribe; a god was called into being with each new-born child, and every death added a god to the long since countless number.
Such was the character of Fiji’s religion before the presence of the white man began to turn the current another way. While, politically, the nation was as a vessel shivered into a thousand pieces, religiously it was like one that had been dashed into a million atoms, which, though found without cohesion, were not without marks of having once cohered. ”

“ It is a crime to be visited with death for anyone to eat the shrine of his god. He, whose god is enshrined in a shark, turtle, duck, or what not, must for ever abstain, however pressed by hunger, from the sacrilegious deed. This is the reason why, in every kingdom, there were to be found persons to whom the eating of human flesh was an abomination. The shrine of their god was human. Funeral honours were not unfrequently paid to deceased shrines, which, whatever might be asserted or proved of the divinity within them, were themselves far from being immortal. ”

“ The fretting and churning sea was filled with a dazzling blaze of phosphorescence; rocks in this mysterious realm were bathed with strange splendours, forming dancing phantoms in a scene of weird revelry. The kelps and sea-weeds were stars and comets—the waters cast up on the hill-side were gleaming rivulets in their return. Away to the horizon stretched an ocean of molten metal, changing with lambent flames of green, blue, and white; and on this ghastly welter of coloured fire was projected the shadow of the hulk of the Sarah Jane, whose silent spars 180reeled among the sheafs of vivid flame. ”

“ Fiji is the largest group of Islands in the Western Pacific. In looking at its chart the thought at once strikes us, that the 200 islands which compose it must, at some remote period, have been connected by lands which the sea has since engulfed. One cannot escape the suspicion that what is now broken up into a thousand pieces, must once have been a country of large proportions, and of surpassing richness and beauty. And further, if Fiji had not at one time a continental connexion, was it not in itself one vast island instead of many small ones. ”

“ A glance at the map of Polynesia is enough to show the fitness of the name given to the myriad islands and islets that stud the whole western half of the vast Pacific. Group after group, island after island, reef everywhere stretching out to embrace reef, north and south of the line for thousands of miles, keeping the mariner ever anxious by day and sleepless by night, seem to tell us, in language that cannot well be mistaken, of mighty continents that once were, and, for anything we know to the contrary, are again to be. ”

“ As we rambled on in the direction of the coast, Lolóma, whose natural gaiety of heart had returned, prattled of many things, but was often beguiled into silence by the splendour of the firmament. It is not surprising when one calls to mind the wondrous beauty of the calm, cloudless nights in Fiji, and the length of time the natives spend in the open air after the sun has set, that they pay some attention to the Heavenly bodies, and have names for them, and theories in regard to them, though bearing no resemblance to those of Copernicus or Galileo. ”

“ As I moved away from the revolting picture, the western sky was still suffused with the sun’s last rays; a crimson haze illuminated the sylvan cloisters at the back of the town, and as the colour gradually faded from the gay dracænas and croton shrubs, and the innumerable laughing ripples of the sea made answer to the murmurings of the dreamy palms, I could not but wonder that a country which seemed suited by nature to be the abode of the highest forms of civilisation should be inhabited by a race of what I could only at that moment regard as the most debased and hopeless savages ”

“ THE PRINCESS LOLÓMA. As I rambled about the mountain solitudes, the sound of the lali, or native drum, beaten in celebration of some heathen rite, and faint echoes from the shrill blast of the conch-shell, blown in honour of some chiefly observance, not infrequently floated up from an extensive valley lying in the centre of the hill country. Occasionally I had seen men moving in the distance, but I was always careful to keep out of view. ”

“ Uplifted also is the club of the great Smiter; and now, crash! crash! crash! To right and left flies the flimsy fence. Well done, great chief. The horrible Smiter’s hands are paralysed, and he himself stands aside in blank wonderment at the uncommon daring of the hero, whose spirit, he now sees, is that of no ordinary child of earth, but one of the bravest of the brave.
“Now the great chief looks seaward, expecting some one from out the briny deep from which he himself but lately emerged. He pauses in front of a screw-pine, and throws whales’ teeth at it. ”

“ I even noticed without shuddering in that terrible sixtieth part of a minute, during which our vessel trembled at this dizzy height, that the sides of the column of malachite-green had a ghastly radiance caught from the sickly sun, that the interior rolled with the gleam of a sapphire, and that there were faint rainbow tints on the outermost edge of spray, while below the sea was churned into a thundering abyss in which it was impossible to distinguish the coral bank from deep water. ”

“ One cannibal juggler would drink large draughts of cocoanut oil, swallow uncooked giant beans, eat fire, and chew the ends of trumpet-shells, while the astonished lookers-on shouted their plaudits or sat trembling in every limb at what to them appeared to be horrible realities. One great magician lives in the poetry of his country, because he possessed a spear that would spring into life at his bidding. ”

“ The return to life of Turner and Cobb was more wonderful than my escape. It seemed that when they fell under the clubs, having good thick skulls, they were only stunned. On regaining consciousness, the cannibal oven was ready to receive them. They had been stripped, and were just about to be thrust in, when the captain, recalling his previous slight knowledge of the country, remembered the words of the prayer which is said by the priest, before the final act of sacrifice. The man who has used those words is sacred, and must not be eaten. ”

“ The sheath-like stalks end in vast green blades, often 12ft. long and 4ft. broad, which serve the natives for dishes and sunshades. The whorls of fruit hang below the curving fronds, with a heart of deep-red flowers forming a brilliant bouquet behind them.
But the true glory of the Polynesian forest is the bread-fruit, crowning the dewy grove with its ample form and luxuriant foliage, and showing itself a beneficent providence to the races it supports without demanding any attention in return. The fruit of this tree is the staple article of food of the Fijians. ”